Hello everyone,
I am very new and recently have decided to move away our growing home/work network away from Google and also increase our digital security. I got recommended to try Proton as it is (as I understand) a full suite of feature we would use (be it mail, productivity apps, vpn, authenticator, cloud) but seeing some of the reactions here, I am concerned.
Are there any really grave concerns about Proton or any substantial flaws I should be aware of as a new user? I also got some mixed reviews about unstable gaming sessions (that would be a home disaster for the kids hehe) as it disconnects but I suppose that is a problem of the free limited VPN connecting to free servers.
Thank you in advance for any input.
EDIT: Thank you again very much to all of you for your time and insight <3 I will investigate all the suggestions/experience and slowly work my way to a better workframe. Again - thank you!
Personally I can’t recommend it, and I’ll likely migrate away soon.
Proton VPN is the only part that I’m really happy with, it has always just worked for me whenever I needed it, but I don’t use it that often.
Proton Mail is underdeveloped. I constantly run into missing features and general pain. Once I lost a really huge email draft I was writing because of some connectivity/sync issues and there was no option for recovery, even though I was sure the contents were still in memory somewhere, just inaccessible. I had to rewrite that from scratch.
Proton Drive is iffy. One of my main uses for it is to back up my photos and videos from my Android phone, and this could really be improved. There is no option to delete the local copy to free up space on the device, you have to do that manually and double-check that each thing you delete is actually backed up, which is tedious. Long videos (20+ minutes) fail to upload at all and crash the app with a memory leak, last I tried it. Photos and videos aside, as cloud storage it has generally worked for me, but as I use Linux I can only use it through a web browser, so there’s no option to sync a folder. This is by far the biggest complaint users have - that they need to make a Proton Drive client for Linux.
All of these issues, I have brought up with Proton support and they have never made any improvements or fixed.
Proton Calendar also feels undercooked, I don’t have more details on that except that it’s more bothersome to use than calendar apps I’ve used in the past. There is no agenda view that spans multiple days, for instance.
SimpleLogin is great, but it wasn’t actually developed at Proton, instead was just bought up by them. Nevertheless, I use it a lot and will likely keep a standalone subscription to it in the future.
I have not used their office suite alternatives, but it’s very surprising and alarming that they can’t open LibreOffice files which are an open standard.
When I do eventually move away, I intend to use Tutanota for email and calendar (hopefully it fares better), and any reputable Nextcloud provider for Drive.
FYI you can use rclone. Proton Drives client apps suck. The fact you can’t even edit a txt file is grossly incompetent.
Never had any issues with mail or VPN, and simplelogin is awesome.
Trial rclone first. I tried it a few months back and there were too many issues with the proton drive adaptor so I went to filen.io .